EnChroma’s Accidental Spectacles Find Niche Among the Colorblind

A pair of EnChroma’s glasses worn by Andrew Schmeder, a mathematician and computer scientist who helped develop them.CreditCreditJason Henry for The New York Times

By Claire Martin

Aug. 15, 2015

The eyeglass lenses that Don McPherson invented were meant for surgeons. But through serendipity he found an entirely different use for them: as a possible treatment for colorblindness.

Mr. McPherson is a glass scientist and an avid Ultimate Frisbee player. He discovered that the lenses he had invented, which protect surgeons’ eyes from lasers and help them differentiate human tissue, caused the world at large to look candy-colored — including the Frisbee field.

At a tournament in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 2002, while standing on a grassy field dotted with orange goal-line cones, he lent a pair of glasses with the lenses to a friend who happened to be colorblind. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Dude, these are amazing,’ ” Mr. McPherson says. “He’s like, ‘I see orange cones. I’ve never seen them before.’ ”

Mr. McPherson was intrigued. He said he did not know the first thing about colorblindness, but felt compelled to figure out why the lenses were having this effect. Mr. McPherson had been inserting the lenses into glasses that he bought at stores, then selling them through Bay Glass Research, his company at the time.

Mr. McPherson went on to study colorblindness, fine-tune the lens technology and start a company called EnChroma that now sells glasses for people who are colorblind. His is among a range of companies that have brought inadvertent or accidental inventions to market. Such inventions have included products as varied as Play-Doh, which started as a wallpaper cleaner, and the pacemaker, discovered through a study of hypothermia.

To learn more about color vision and the feasibility of creating filters to correct colorblindness, Mr. McPherson applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2005. He worked with vision scientists and a mathematician and computer scientist named Andrew Schmeder. They weren’t the first to venture into this industry; the history of glassmakers claiming to improve colorblindness is long and riddled with controversy.

Colorblindness occurs when the cells in the retina that enable the brain to perceive color are abnormal. The most common color vision deficiency affects the red or green cones, making it difficult to distinguish those colors; blue-cone abnormalities also exist. Total colorblindness, in which a person sees only black and white, is very rare.

Mr. McPherson and Mr. Schmeder linked with Tony Dykes, a business development director at a technology start-up who had also worked as a lawyer in Silicon Valley, and they founded EnChroma. In 2012, they introduced the glasses to the public, selling them online through the company’s website for $700 a pair. But they ran into a big problem. “It was not a very popular product,” Mr. Dykes said.

One of EnChroma’s misfires was a marketing approach that emphasized the science behind the glasses. “That doesn’t work for something like colorblindness, which is a really experiential thing,” Mr. Dykes said.

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“It works in some cases and not others,” Tony Dykes said of the EnChroma glasses. “It’s not a magical cure or a cheat.”CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Persuading people to try any new product is tricky. “It’s not until the benefits of a new technology are overwhelming that we all flock to the new device or service,” said Suleiman Kassicieh, distinguished professor of management of technology at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management.

Another early hurdle was that opticians and optometrists could not carve prescriptions into the EnChroma lenses, as they can with traditional lenses. The steep price did not help win customers, either.

The founders looked at ways to bring costs down while still creating a similar product. They hired a manufacturer that was more cost-efficient and also able to tweak the application of the filters so the lenses could be used in prescription glasses.

In December, the company rereleased the glasses at a price of $330 to $430. It sells models for outdoor and indoor use and carries children’s sizes.

A competitor, 2AI Labs, makes the 02Amp sunglasses using different technology; the glasses are sold on Amazon for $277 to $447 and are available internationally through distributors.

EnChroma was still struggling to solve its marketing conundrum when another serendipitous event occurred: A paint company wanted to finance an ad campaign featuring the glasses. The idea was to introduce color to the colorblind. To that end, videos were made of EnChroma users wearing the glasses for the first time while looking at things like sunsets, colorful artwork and, of course, paint samples.

The ad campaign increased EnChroma’s sales and spurred a trend: New EnChroma customers began filming and sharing their experiences online. The company placed inserts in its eyeglass boxes encouraging customers to participate.

Prompted by the insert, Bob Balcom, a 60-year-old retired high school science teacher and labor relations specialist in Chatham, N.Y., uploaded his first YouTube video in March. Shot by his wife, it shows Mr. Balcom putting the glasses over his own eyeglasses and staring up at the sky quietly for several seconds. “The blue sky is deeper than I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It reminds me of Colorado. And the pine trees, they’re just so green.” Tears stream down his cheeks and into his gray beard.

Mr. Dykes credits the video campaign with helping overcome “the inherent resistance people had to something they couldn’t quite wrap their minds around,” he said. He estimated the company’s sales at several million dollars this year.

But according to Jay Neitz, a vision scientist an ophthalmology professor at the University of Washington, these glasses and the others before them don’t rely on solid science. “People who cannot see red and green are easily victimized, just like many other examples of people with incurable conditions,” Dr. Neitz wrote in an email, adding that the glasses “cannot ‘cure’ colorblindness or do much to aid colorblind people except under some special circumstances.”

Mr. Dykes countered that the glasses were not meant to be a cure, in the same way that reading glasses don’t cure farsightedness. He also acknowledged that the glasses don’t work for all types of colorblindness and said the company had a 30-day return policy for that reason. “It works in some cases and not others,” he said. “It’s not a magical cure or a cheat.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding a Niche for the Accidental Spectacles. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe